Betaworks recently announced that they had collected data from over 40,000 users who shared their iPhone homescreens through their apptly named #homescreen app. As they stated in their announcement, the apps people keep on their homescreen are often the apps they use the most. Being a data-minded individual I thought, “I wonder what kind of…
Today we are happy to bring you another interview in our Toolmaker Talk series. We had the great pleasure of speaking with Sampo Karjalainen, the designer and founder of Moves. Over fifty percent of U.S. adults have a smartphone. That’s a lot of people walking around with a multi-sensored computer in their pockets. Moves is another example of…
Sara Cambridge is an interaction designer and a frequent contributor to the Quantified Self community. This past spring she was tasked with creating a unique information visualization as part of her graduate coursework at the UC Berkeley iSchool. Given her interest in QS she chose to use her experience with tracking her diet using the…
“How do you feel right now?” Such a short question can lead us toward profound insights into our lives. But how do we ask ourselves that question? How do we keep track of our answers? There are many different ideas out there about how to tackle this seemingly simple question. Many of them focus on…
Alastair Tse recently moved to New York, and wanted to walk all of the streets of Manhattan! He tried a few different approaches to tracking this that didn’t work, so he decided to make his own app that doesn’t use GPS or drain his phone battery. In the video below, Alastair talks about his adventures in…
Melanie Swan of DIY Genomics describes the results of sequencing her own genome in the hopes of developing her own personalized preventive medicine strategies. She developed a mobile app that permits exporting of personalized sequencing data more easily. A series of small nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were identified by Melanie in her own genome relating to…
Victor van Doorn describes himself as a nostalgic workaholic. He has tried and failed to keep diaries, so he decided to build an automatic one. His iPhone app Replay My Day (@replaymyday) collects his location and online activities each day, and builds it into a film – so when he’s lying in bed at night…
When I want to start tracking a metric in my life, most of the time I use an app or service that enables me to do it more easily or provide options like statistics or sharing. I’ve tracked a lot of different things, some better and more easily than others. Sometimes my data would be…
In this video, Rajiv Mehta talks about the importance of remembering for good experimentation — carrying out the experiment as planned and capturing the results properly — and the difficulty of doing this well. He described a new app, Tonic, that helps people remember and keep track of their health activities, and shared examples of people…
From the Amsterdam QS Show&Tell group: Martijn Aslander talks about his PersonalStats.nl project to track all of his personal data. He records everything from travel to the 5 best and worst things he does each day to how many people he addresses at his lectures. He meets 100-200 people every week, and was interested to learn…
From the Amsterdam QS Show&Tell Meetup group: Beer van Geer (aka Universal Media Man) shows his award-winning Dagaz Project. His application uses the Neurosky EEG headset to quantify brainwaves during meditation on Mandala symbols. As you meditate you can see your progress in real-time. Watch his mind-blowing talk below. Beer van Geer – Project Dagaz…
Our first Quantified Self Show and Tell in Amsterdam took place on September 20 at Het Volkskrantgebouw. More than sixty people showed up to attend and some even came from Germany and France! Sebastiaan ter Burg kindly provided us help with the video and photos. All the videos can be found on Vimeo and all photos on Flickr….
A post from Michael Nagle, host of the Boston Quantified Self Show&Tell, recapping the QS meetup that took place on August 10th 2010 at MIT’s Media Lab.
Our last discussion post was so popular that we’re doing it again. Today’s topic is: What metrics are you currently tracking about yourself? What do you measure daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly? You get bonus points if you share what tools you use to track your data or any insights you’ve learned. I’ll start off…
If you know basic web development but haven’t got a clue how to build iPhone apps, Jonathan Stark has written a book you might want to read. It’s called Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and the full text is free (for now) at http://building-iphone-apps.labs.oreilly.com/
I’d love your feedback on this question. Last Friday morning, I met with Aman Bhandari in President Obama’s Chief Technology Office. It was an intense 45 minutes! Aman is coordinating the Community Health Data Initiative, which involves taking the datasets that HHS has recently released to the public, incorporating other datasets through partnerships, and inspiring…
What do you get when you mashup open health data, government officials, and app developers? A “river of mojo” for health innovation. These are the words of Todd Park, CTO of HHS, who recently instigated the release of several government health datasets for public analysis. Park revved up the audience at the sold-out Community Health…
Robin Barooah presented his new meditation tracker, called “Equanimity” at the recent QS Show&Tell hosted by MedHelp. A meditation practice is a powerful tool for increased well being and yet, for something so simple and cost-free, it surprisingly difficult to maintain. The problem of “resistance” in meditation is well known. Even people with long years…
A few weeks ago I wrote about the dream of the mood phone. This dream has been so persistent that its appeal probably reaches beyond mere technical utility to touch other, unspoken feelings about the role of the phone in our social life. After all, it is often hard to perceive the mood of a…
